The longing for sight is a mirror, in which instead of polish-lines
there are thorns, and during the search for sight these thorns have created
scratches. In the first line of this verse there are four meaningful [i.e.,
necessarily present] i.zaafat
constructions, and the presence of more than three i.zaafats
is a poetic flaw. There's no doubt that if more than one i.zaafat
is present, slackness develops in the construction-- not to speak of four
i.zaafats, and those too meaningful ones! (50)

The mirror, that is, the mirror of my longing for sight,
in which instead of faces there are thorns which ought to be considered the
result of the extreme heat of the effort at sight-- just as it commonly happens
that those who run around and make excessive efforts have thorns lodge in
their feet. (53)

He says, don't ask me about the state of complete heat and
effort of my mirror. What difficulties and troubles I've endured in the quest
for people of insight and inquiry!-- such that now the polish-lines of my
mirror of perfection are pricking in my eyes like thorns. In despair at not
finding any accomplished judges of poetry, I only want to find someone who
will pull out the polish-lines of perfection from my mirror as though they
were thorns. (95-96)

In the longing for sight, how much effort the mirror of
my eyes, or the mirror of my heart, made! Now there's no more time for that
question-- don't ask it. Rather, just look at state of the polish-lines of
passion and the polish-lines of searching-- they've become like thorns....
Now I wish that somebody would take those polish-lines away from me. (121)

He calls the foot of ardor a mirror, because it has been
worn smooth into a mirror. The thorns that have lodged in it he has called
the polish-lines of that mirror. Both similes
are very lofty and entirely new. In Mirza's poetry, there's a typhoon of entirely
new and entirely untouched similes. (130)

This is another of his 'mirror' verses, which tend to be
some of his most complex. As usual, the mirror is a metal one, with small
polish-lines that show how it has been cleaned.

But four i.zaafat
constructions in a row! The i.zaafat is versatile in
any case; for more on its possibilities, see {16,1}.
Perhaps Nazm is a touch severe, but still, Ghalib is certainly pushing his
luck. The Urdu indeed feels almost as clumsy and forced as the four sequential
and bumpy 'of' constructions in the translation. That being said, the ambiguity
level of the i.zaafat constructions is, by Ghalibian
standards, quite restrained. The chief duality that emerges is at the end
of the i.zaafat string: is it the 'search of sight'
in the sense of a 'search for sight', or is it a 'search made by Sight' for
something else?

And the big question-- how to put it all together? It isn't
at all clear how we are to find 'objective correlatives' for the images. What
is 'my mirror'? Is it my longing for sight (Nazm, Hasrat), my eyes or heart
(Bekhud Mohani), or the 'foot of ardor' (Josh)? All these entities sit awkwardly
with the idea of having polish-lines in them. And then, of course, to demand
that the polish-lines be pulled out like thorns is itself a large and peculiar
leap; why exactly (other than shape) are the polish-lines like thorns, and
how are they to be pulled out, and by whom, and from what? Josh's idea that
the mirror is really a foot is an attempt to account for the thorns, but of
course it has major silliness problems of its own.

If there were a link through the concept of heat, that would
help a lot: the first line laments the intense heat of the search for/by sight,
and the second would propose a remedy for it. Is it conceivable that the physical
polishing of the metal mirror, that creates the polish-marks, generates painfully
intense heat? If so, where is the connection to thorns and the removing of
thorns, which have nothing to do with heat?

In short, in this verse Ghalib is metaphorically equating
abstractions with abstractions. The verse is unresolvably confusing; its energy
spins out into a cloud of uncertainty. I think it's one of his less satisfactory
verses. But of course, there could well be some 'key' to it-- some idiom or
bit of wordplay now lost to us-- that would resolve these problems and provide
the focal point that the verse now lacks.